The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As a hypothetical, assume that an organization's communications network comprises several network devices and periodically, a network device may malfunction. The organization may return the device to its manufacturer and replace the malfunctioning network device with another network device that is provided by the manufacturer.
A typical problem in replacing the malfunctioning network device with another network device is port misconnections. A network device may have twenty four or forty eight ports and usually all of the ports of a network device are in use. The chances of a particular port on a network device being misconnected are non-zero. The consequences of a port being misconnected may be that one or more computing devices may be prevented from transmitting messages to and receiving messages from the network device, thus effectively removing the one or more computing devices from the organization's communications network.